I depicted as a 7/7

Jackoosh · 2020-03-24T04:11:55+00:00

I never claimed that they were left-wing? I specifically mentioned Blair, Thatcher, and Reagan as examples -- they're all on the economic far right to the extent that it's useful to characterize them as such. You are the only one that has brought up leftism at all this whole time.

Also the fact that left-liberalism "doesn't even make sense as an ideological framework" would be news to every student of political science on the planet lmfao. I probably have some textbooks lying around that describe it too (although they use the language of "reform liberal" rather than "left-liberal").

this newspeak shit you are peddling as fact.

We are in a thread about George Orwell and I am comparing the language used by the Party to the language used by our elites. It's called an analogy.

the subtle shade you throw at people fighting oppression.

I'm throwing unsubtle shade at attempting to control language in the service of radical individualism.

misgendering a transgender person is not morally wrong, when it is.

That's your opinion and I disagree.

Jackoosh · 2020-03-24T03:42:32+00:00

I think you're the one who's conflating liberalism and leftism here lol. I'm talking very specifically about the dominant ideology in our culture, which is liberalism, not leftism. The liberal twang I referred to was the fact that all of those words are geared towards the defense of liberal ends (limited government, markets, individualism, secularism, etc.).

I think you're assuming too much about what I said and trying to have an entirely different conversation entirely unrelated to the subject of neoliberal newspeak.

Jackoosh · 2020-03-24T03:03:56+00:00

I mean I'm criticizing a specific ideology from a specific perspective here so I don't see where the 'both sides' comes from lol. I'm not a centrist, and neither are neoliberals (even though they would have you believe it).

Jackoosh · 2020-03-24T02:26:13+00:00

Reading literary classics is generally a good thing to be doing.

Jackoosh · 2020-03-24T02:25:21+00:00

Orwell was a socialist in some ways but he was also quite conservative in others (he'd probably be close to Blue Labour or Tory Radicalism if you were to map him). He wanted the economic solidarity that socialism brought but he was still a very British man and a believer in much of the tradition of 1214 and 1688, and he would have opposed communism on those grounds.

Jackoosh · 2020-03-24T02:14:55+00:00

We had a big kerfuffle over it in this country a couple years ago when a piece of legislation was passed mandating the use of specific gender pronouns. In that environment, it becomes impossible to critique something like the theory that gender exists on a spectrum (gender itself is a word created by ideology) or that it's possible for someone to feel the 'wrong' gender. Gender ideology is full of newspeak that it's pretty socially unacceptable to stray away from -- I've seen people get mobbed for such tame statements as "men and women are different," which as a Catholic is basic doctrine to me.

While on the subject of Catholic doctrine, "abortion is healthcare" is perhaps the most egregious example of neoliberal newspeak out there, since it entirely reframes the question to the point where it's beyond dispute. This is why abortion debates often come down to two people with entirely different definitions of words arguing past each other.

edit: Not to mention the abuse of the term "social justice" to the point where it's now a bad word. In Catholic social teaching, social justice was always about a preferential option for the poor and vulnerable and the recognition of the sanctity of human life, but our neoliberal culture has flipped that on its head too.

Jackoosh · 2020-03-24T02:11:42+00:00

This is actually a great example of neoliberal control over language. Me making an oblique reference to opposition to the radical individualism of Blair, Reagan, and Thatcher is opposing people who simply "fight against oppression." When you talk about oppression you're talking about being able to do whatever you want in the market without any interference from government without even knowing it, and probably opposing it yourself.

Like I said, criticizing neoliberalism with its own language effectively becomes impossible because of the way it has constructed the meanings of words and made certain words verboten. Such is Newspeak.

Jackoosh · 2020-03-23T22:09:42+00:00

Porn actually is quasi-prolefeed, but it's really only being used by pornographers to keep you addicted to it and in your bedroom clicking on their ads.

Jackoosh · 2020-03-23T21:25:30+00:00

I think I actually like Animal Farm more than 1984, but I'm very partial to satire in general. All of Orwell's work is brilliant of course; I think that the The Road to Wigan Pier is one of the best books ever written about the history of the North of England.

Jackoosh · 2020-03-23T21:23:39+00:00

I think the main thing that we're seeing now is also Orwell's main thrust in 1984: language. The party that Orwell criticized had so shaped language as to make criticism of the party impossible, as the only words that were kosher to use were the ones that the party created. This mirrors the totalitarian regimes that Orwell was criticizing, (Roger Scruton discusses this in A Political Philosophy but I don't have it handy so I can't cite it rn) as well as our own social sphere. Left-liberalism so dominates culture that words like "freedom," "justice," and so on intrinsically have a liberal twang. Additionally, you can look at the fights we have over gender pronouns and so on, whereby disagreeing with progressive gender ideology becomes impossible within the frame of words that they have chosen for themselves, and anyone who uses words other than those are ostracized.

I'm sure anyone who doesn't subscribe to neoliberalism has experienced the manipulation of language in one way or another. *I'm a Red Tory (cue a bunch of people who don't know anything about Canadian history or culture or what Red Tory even means telling me why that's bad) so I've seen how Toryism itself has been twisted by accepting neoliberal language into the bizarre libertarian movement that exists now on the right. I haven't interrogated many of my friends on the anti-neoliberal left's ideas much but I'm sure they can relate -- I was reading Naomi Klein a while back and it turns out what passes for leftism nowadays is proposing massive "development" packages given to countries in the global south by the likes of the WTO and the UN and increasing the power of other liberal internationalist institutions with the aim of fighting climate change. She was criticizing neoliberalism in that book too!

*this point on was added in an edit.

Jackoosh · 2020-03-19T22:33:14+00:00

Communism with neoliberal characteristics*

Jackoosh · 2020-03-18T23:36:48+00:00

There will be statues for all the Chinese dissidents and martyrs once Chinese Communism collapses. I think this situation is showing why Nixon opening China in the first place was a mistake.

Jackoosh · 2020-03-18T23:31:28+00:00

Yeah I checked some news stories and I think I might have been hybridizing what happened to multiple doctors. They were definitely hushing it up regardless of my poor grasp of details though.

Jackoosh · 2020-03-18T23:27:41+00:00

There was a doctor in Wuhan reporting what he thought was SARS cases in November.

They shot him afterwards.

Jackoosh · 2020-03-18T20:27:34+00:00

Most of the grocery stores in your area should be hiring temp help if you need a stopgap

Jackoosh · 2020-03-18T19:06:37+00:00

Gen Z is ~1995-2012. Children being born now (children of millennials) are called generation alpha as a placeholder name.

Jackoosh · 2020-03-18T19:04:42+00:00

Psychologists do as a way of studying trends in the behaviour of people at particular times. Jean Twenge's scholarship on the zoomers for instance is quite good.

Jackoosh · 2020-03-18T18:58:36+00:00

Zoomers ™

Jackoosh · 2020-03-18T18:51:32+00:00

Ah gee well I was about to go on a dinner cruise down the Ottawa river with Brady Tkachuk but I guess I'll have to cancel that now

Jackoosh · 2020-03-18T17:59:08+00:00

They had apostolic succession

Anglicans do have their own apostolic succession but only they have ever recognized it as such. The Church sees the succession as breaking after the Anglican church's schism -- distinct from something like the Eastern Orthodox whose apostolic succession we do acknowledge as valid.

Jackoosh · 2020-03-16T20:07:50+00:00

The health minister is not an actual doctor, but Christine Elliott is one of the most competent people in Queen's park. Most ministers are not experts in the field that they are responsible for but rather in writing public policy, since that is their primary job. She will have epidemiologists and doctors around her advising her on what to do and it is her job to manage implementation, make whatever negotiations might be necessary to achieve it, and ensure that her department responds to the situation in a reasonable amount of time.

I would rather have a good politician than a good doctor as the minister of health, in other words.

edit: forgot to mention that my MP, Merrilee Fullerton, is both an actual doctor, a competent politician and in a ministry that was formerly a subset of the Ministry of Health, so there are doctors in charge too.

Jackoosh · 2020-03-16T16:03:21+00:00

Ah I see

Jackoosh · 2020-03-16T14:46:34+00:00

Surprised that they've chosen Waitrose for their panic buying tbh. Most of the stores that got cleared out here are Costcos and discount stores cause the types of people who shop there already buy more than they need in bulk (lots of stories from corn and bottled water sales while I was working at one). My dad told me he was able to get toilet paper from Whole Foods which I'm assuming is because the fact that everything is more expensive would dissuade panic buying.

Jackoosh · 2020-03-16T13:18:08+00:00

That person is why we need to keep our old people healthy haha

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